The Hillman Part 31

"Because you make me feel--something I don't understand, because you come and you turn the world, for a few minutes, topsyturvy. But that is all foolishness, isn't it? Life isn't built up of emotions. What I want you to understand, and what you, please, must understand, is that at present our lives are so far, so very far, apart. I do not feel I could be happy leading yours, and you do not understand mine."

"I have come to find out about yours," John explained. "That is why I am here. Perhaps I ought to have waited a little time before I spoke to you as I did just now. Come, you can forget what I have said and done; but to me it will be an everlasting joy. I shall treasure the memory of it.

It will help me--I can't tell you quite in what way it will help me. But for the rest, I will serve my apprenticeship. I will try to get into sympathy with the things that please you. It will not take me long. As soon as you feel that we are drawing closer together, I will ask you again what I have asked you this afternoon. In the meantime, I may be your friend, may I not? You will let me see a great deal of you? You will help me just a little?"

Louise leaned back in her chair. She had been carried off her feet, brought face to face with emotions which she dared not a.n.a.lyze. Perhaps, after all her self-dissection, there were still secret chambers. She thought almost with fear of what they might contain. Her sense of superiority was vanishing. She was, after all, like other women.

"Yes," she promised, "I will help. We will leave it at that. Some day you shall talk to me again, if you like. In the meantime, remember we are both free. You have not known many women, and you may change your mind when you have been longer in London. Perhaps it will be better for you if you do!"

"That is quite impossible," John said firmly. "You see," he went on, looking at her with shining eyes, "I know now what I half believed from the first moment that I saw you. I love you!"

Springing restlessly to her feet, she walked across the room and back again. Action of some sort seemed imperative. A curious hypnotic feeling seemed to be dulling all her powers of resistance. She looked into her life and she was terrified. Everything had grown insignificant. It couldn't really be possible that with her brains, her experience, this man who had dwelt all his life in the simple ways had yet the power to show her the path toward the greater things!

Through the complex web of emotions which made up her temperament there suddenly sprang a primitive instinct, the primitive instinct of all women, rebelling against the first touch of a master's hand. Was she to find herself wrong and this man right? Was she to submit, to accept from his hand the best gifts of life--she who had looked for them in such very high, such very inaccessible places?

She felt like a child again. She trembled a little as she sat down by his side. It was not in this fashion that she had intended to hear what he had to say.

"I don't know what is the matter with me to-day," she murmured distractedly. "I think I must send you away. You disturb my thoughts. I can't see life clearly. Don't hope for too much from me," she begged.

"But don't go away," she added, with a sudden irresistible impulse of anxiety. "Oh, I wish--I wish you understood me and everything about me, without my having to say a word!"

"I feel what you are," he answered, "and that is sufficient."

Once more she rose to her feet and walked across to the window. An automobile had stopped in the street below. She looked down upon it with a sudden frozen feeling of apprehension.

John moved to her side, and for him, too, the joy of those few moments was clouded. A little shiver of presentiment took its place. He recognized the footman whom he saw standing upon the pavement.

"It is the Prince of Seyre," Louise faltered.

"Must you see him?" John muttered.

"Yes!"

"Send him away," John begged. "We haven't finished yet. I won't say anything more to upset you. What I want now is some practical guidance."

"I cannot send him away!"

John glanced toward her and hated himself for his fierce jealousy. She was looking very white and very pathetic. The light had gone from her eyes. He felt suddenly dominant, and, with that feeling, there came all the generosity of the conqueror.

"Good-by!" he said. "Perhaps I can see you some time to-morrow."

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed her fingers, one by one. Then he left the room. She listened to his footsteps descending the stairs, firm, resolute, deliberate. They paused, there was a sound of voices--the prince and he were exchanging greetings; then she heard other footsteps ascending, lighter, smoother, yet just as deliberate.

Her face grew paler as she listened. There was something which sounded to her almost like the beating of fate in the slow, inevitable approach of this unseen visitor.

XX

Henri Graillot had made himself thoroughly comfortable. He was ensconced in the largest of John's easy chairs, his pipe in his mouth, a recently refilled teacup--Graillot was English in nothing except his predilection for tea--on the small table by his side. Through a little cloud of tobacco-smoke he was studying his host.

"So you call yourself a Londoner now, my young friend, I suppose," he remarked, taking pensive note of John's fashionable clothes. "It is a transformation, beyond a doubt! Is it, I wonder, upon the surface only, or have you indeed become heart and soul a son of this corrupt city?"

"Whatever I may have become," John grumbled, "it's meant three months of the hardest work I've ever done!"

Graillot held out his pipe in front of him and blew away a dense cloud of smoke.

"Explain yourself," he insisted.

John stood on the hearth-rug, with his hands in his pockets. His morning clothes were exceedingly well-cut, his tie and collar unexceptionable, his hair closely cropped according to the fashion of the moment. He had an extremely civilized air.

"Look here, Graillot," he said, "I'll tell you what I've done, although I don't suppose you would understand what it means to me. I've visited practically every theater in London."

"Alone?"

"Sometimes with Miss Maurel, sometimes with her little friend, Sophy Gerard, and sometimes alone," John replied. "I have bought a Baedeker, taken a taxicab by the day, and done all the sights. I've spent weeks in the National Gallery, picture-gazing, and I've done all those more modern shows up round Bond Street. I have bought a racing-car and learned to drive it. I have been to dinner parties that have bored me stiff. I have been introduced to crowds of people whom I never wish to see again, and made one or two friends," he added, smiling at his guest, "for whom I hope I am properly grateful."

"The prince has been showing you round a bit, hasn't he?" Graillot grunted.

"The prince has been extraordinarily kind to me," John admitted slowly, "for what reason I don't know. He has introduced me to a great many pleasant and interesting people, and a great many whom I suppose a young man in my position should be glad to know. He has shown me one side of London life pretty thoroughly."

"And what about it all?" Graillot demanded. "You find yourself something more of a citizen of the world, eh?"

"Not a bit," John answered simply. "The more I see of the life up here, the smaller it seems to me. I mean, of course, the ordinary life of pleasure, the life to be lived by a young man like myself, who hasn't any profession or work upon which he can concentrate his thoughts."

"Then why do you stay?"

John made no immediate reply. Instead, he walked to the window of his sitting room and stood looking out across the Thames with a discontented frown upon his face. Between him and the Frenchman a curious friendship had sprung up during the last few months.

"Tell me, then," Graillot continued, taking a bite from his piece of cake and shaking the crumbs from his waistcoat, "what do you find in London to compensate you for the things you miss? You are cooped up here in this little flat--you, who are used to large rooms and open s.p.a.ces; you have given up your exercise, your sports--for what?"

"I get some exercise," John protested. "I play rackets at Ranelagh most mornings, and I bought a couple of hacks and ride occasionally in the park before you're out of bed."

"That's all right for exercise," Graillot observed. "What about amus.e.m.e.nts?"

"Well, I've joined a couple of clubs. One's rather a swagger sort of place--the prince got me in there; and then I belong to the Lambs, where you yourself go sometimes. I generally look in at one or the other of them during the evening."

"You see much of Miss Maurel?"

John shook his head gloomily.

"Not as much as I should like," he confessed. "She seems to think and dream of nothing but this play of yours. I am hoping that when it is once produced she will be more free."

"I gather," Graillot concluded, "that, to put it concisely and truthfully, you are the most bored man in London. There is something behind all this effort of yours, my friend, to fit yourself, the round human being, into the square place. Speak the truth, now! Treat me as a father confessor."

John swung round upon his heel. In the clear light it was obvious that he was a little thinner in the face and that some of the tan had gone from his complexion.

"I am staying up here, and going on with it," he announced doggedly, "because of a woman."